The Hewlett Foundation Blog

GiveWell's Holden Karnofsky wrote a thoughtful blog post about the Hewlett Foundation's decision to end the Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative, which we announced publicly earlier this year. The post looks at the Initiative, and our decision to end it, from a grantee's perspective. Karnofsky offers this helpful summary of his thinking:

In short:

-We believe that Hewlett’s philanthropy program was a strong use of philanthropic funds. The program is reported to have spent a total of $12 million over 8 years, and we think its impact on GiveWell alone will likely ultimately be responsible for enough influence on donations to easily justify that expenditure.

-We believe that ending this program may have been the right decision. With that said, we disagree with the specific reasoning Hewlett has given, for the same reason that we disagreed with its strategic plan while the program was running. We believe that Hewlett’s goal of influencing 10% of donors was unrealistic and unnecessary, at least over the time frame in question. We believe the disagreement may reflect a broader difference in how we see the yardstick by which a philanthropic program ought to be evaluated.

-We are very positive on how Hewlett ended the program. Great care was taken to end it in a way that gave grantees ample advance notice and aimed to avoid disruptive transitions. We also applaud Hewlett’s decision to publish its reasoning in ending the program and invite a public discussion, and we broadly feel that Hewlett is delivering on its stated intent to become a highly transparent grantmaker.

Philanthropy Program Officer Lindsay Louie responds in comments to the post:

The question you raised about by what yardstick a philanthropic program should be evaluated is a timely one for us. At the Hewlett Foundation, we have just recently been grappling with the question of when to set precise, quantitative goals and when a directional goal may be most appropriate. Our motto in the Effective Philanthropy Group is “purpose first” and that certainly applies to this question. Sometimes, a bold target like influencing 10% of donations can serve to inspire and galvanize support AND serve as a yardstick by which to measure progress. Other times, the goal can be so audacious as to be unrealistic and unhelpful in measuring progress or to inform future strategic direction.

The Hewlett Foundation Blog

In a post at Stanford Social Innovation Review, Maribel Morey continues the conversation about our recently announced Madison Initiative, criticizing the initiative's focus on gridlock in Congress, which she attributes to Hewlett Foundation President Larry Kramer's "democratic theory:"

{B]y contextualizing the Madison Initiative within Hewlett Foundation President Larry Kramer’s own scholarship, the project gains some intellectual coherence and shows that its roots are different from what either Callahan or Stid suggest. Rather, the Madison Initiative is specifically a reflection of Kramer’s democratic theory. That said, his theory limits the ability of the initiative to meet its general goal of rescuing a troubled American democracy. If the project cares to maintain this broader purpose, then it will need to move beyond Kramer’s restrictive definition of American democracy and adopt a more multi-layered one.

In a comment on Morey's post, Larry argues that she has misunderstood the political theory at work in his book The People Themselves, and defends the Madison Initiative's focus on Congress:

The Hewlett Foundation’s initiative focuses on Congress not because it is the exclusive forum for [negotiating agreements in our society between people with vastly different beliefs and interests], but because Congress remains the preeminent one, and because successfully moving even that institution in a positive direction is already a pretty monumental task.

The Hewlett Foundation Blog

Earlier this week, Madison Initiative Director Daniel Stid responded to a broadside critique of our new line of grantmaking from David Callahan at Inside Philanthropy, which is neatly summarized by it's title: “Why Won’t Foundations Like Hewlett Just Stand Up and Fight For Their Values?” While we, of course, disagree with much of what he wrote, we appreciate the directness of Callahan's piece. It gave Daniel an opportunity to clarify how, in this domain as in others, the Hewlett Foundation strives to be pragmatic and non-ideological in its grantmaking.

In his response, Daniel also emphasized that the Madison Initiative, “is emphatically not a value-neutral exercise. We will be partisans—but for representative government. In this effort, we will work with grantees and funding partners not only in the center but also on the right and left who—whatever their other commitments—believe in the fundamental importance of our representative institutions and processes, have good ideas about how to support and improve their health, and are prepared to engage in reasoned debate with others about the best way forward.” The full post contains some important ideas about the nature of about our grantmaking, and we would appreciate your thoughts on it.

The Hewlett Foundation Blog

The Hewlett Foundation announced a pledge of $18.5 million to the Global Partnership for Education’s 2015-18 replenishmenttoday. The pledge, which will be fulfilled through the Foundation’s grantmaking and technical support to civil society organizations and other key actors in global education, will support capacity building for better systems for learning assessment and the use of assessment data to inform planning and improve learning outcomes. It will also support civil society organizations that are using citizen-led, household assessments of learning to raise awareness about children’s learning status and to motivate action at the national, sub-national and community level for improved learning.

The Hewlett Foundation Blog

Global Development and Population Program Officer Helena Choi, writing with David Devlin-Foltz of the Aspen Planning and Evaluation Program, at Stanford Social Innovation Review:

A few years ago, the Hewlett Foundation realized that supporting national or sub-national advocacy within the Global South required a new grant-making strategy and partners. The foundation worked with the Tides Foundation to launch the Money Well Spent initiative in 2009. The initiative was intended to support advocacy and policy-related activities to solve specific problems that hinder the efficiency and effectiveness of spending in the family planning and reproductive health sector.

From the 151 initial letters-of-interest received, Hewlett selected six projects for funding in August 2009. The projects shared a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, but represented a wide diversity of scale, context, and approach. Three of these projects inform this essay: Pathfinder International’s Tanzania office’s work to encourage districts to fund family planning and reproductive health services; Gender Action’s advocacy to eliminate user fees based on evidence of their impact on women’s access to services in Cameroon and Uganda; and Ipas’s projects in Malawi and Nigeria to demonstrate the cost savings associated with shifting from treating complications of unsafe abortion to providing safe abortion care. These three best illustrate the issues we wish to explore here: the relationships between a US-based funder, international non-governmental organizations (INGO) intermediaries, and local NGOs, and the use of locally generated evidence in support of advocacy.

The Hewlett Foundation Blog

Global Development and Population Fellow Rachel Quint recently co-authored a blog post with Allison Anderson of the Brookings Institution about the two leading proposals for education goals and targets in the post-2015 development agenda.

From Brookings' Education + Development blog:

One of the key questions facing the framers of the post-2015 agenda is how to best address education access, quality, outcomes and equity. While the Millennium Development Goal targets successfully prioritized schooling access, the last 15 years have illustrated that schooling access must be paired with actions that address education quality. Moreover, the expansion of access seen so far has left behind many of the most marginalized and poor children, including girls, and many who are in school face the “hidden exclusion” of being in school but not learning.

Lively discussions among U.N. member states, U.N. agencies and civil society representatives are helping to craft meaningful goals and targets to shape international education policies. At the crux of these discussions are two proposals for education goals and targets: one from the inter-governmental Open Working Group (OWG) on Sustainable Development Goals and the other from the Education for All Steering Committee (EFA SC).

But with two global proposals, how do we know which language to use in a post-2015 framework?

The Hewlett Foundation Blog

Do countries have the data they need to measure progress against the proposed post-2015 development goals and targets? As Kristen Stelljes described in her recent blog post, a Post-2015 Data Test is underway to answer that very question in real time. Through this project, local think tanks and research institutions in countries across the world are investigating what data is available to measure proposed post-2015 targets. Check out the latest updates from Turkey, Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Senegal, and a blog update from Sierra Leone on strengthening data and statistics at the national level.

The Hewlett Foundation Blog

San Francisco's ABC 7 News recently reported on the The Kodály Center for Music Education and their efforts to preserve American folk music. A recent grant from our Performing Arts Program is intended to help the Center double the size of its collection.